Liminal Thinking. Dave Gray

      Even the obvious. Especially the obvious.

      All beliefs are approximations, because the whole of reality is unknowable. Any scientist who is worth her salt will tell you this. Beliefs may have some truth to them, but all of us are fallible, and so are our beliefs.

      Buddha said his teachings were like a finger pointing at the moon. The finger is helpful if you want to see the moon, but you should not mistake the finger for the moon.

      It’s the same with beliefs. They are like fingers pointing at the reality, which is the moon. Do not mistake the belief for the reality!

      Liminal thinking is learning to see that there are many “obviouses”—and that what is obvious depends on your experiences and your point of view. It also means cultivating the ability to listen and to pay attention to “obviouses” that are different than yours. If one of the blind men had decided to move in a circle around the elephant, and felt what others were feeling, he would have been operating in a liminal way, challenging his own assumptions and beliefs.

       The obvious is not obvious.

       EXERCISE

      Think of a topic on which you have strong beliefs, like a political opinion or religious belief. Now think of someone you know who holds a different belief. Now, try as earnestly as you can to consider their point of view, either by talking to them or honestly researching the topic. Make a list of valid points from both sides of the argument.

PRINCIPLE 1 Beliefs are models.

      Beliefs seem like perfect representations of the world, but, in fact, they are imperfect models for navigating a complex, multidimensional, unknowable reality.

PRINCIPLE 2 Beliefs Are Created

      The map is not the territory.

       —Alfred Korzybski

      Around noon on August 9, 2014, a hot summer day in Ferguson, Missouri, a young black man named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer named Darren Wilson.

      Although there were several witnesses to the shooting, their stories about what happened varied widely.

      In the following days and weeks, the mostly black population clashed with the mostly white police force of Ferguson in an escalating series of protests, riots, and police clamp-downs.

      This is not a new pattern in the United States. It is a recurring one that has been happening for years. Even as I write this, a similar pattern is unfolding in Baltimore, after a young black man named Freddie Gray died of a broken neck while in police custody.

      Every time something like this happens, a battle for the obvious unfolds in the news media, in living rooms, on social media, and elsewhere.

      In one narrative, police are the frontline enforcers of a racist society that systemically oppresses black people, where poverty and hopelessness generate legitimate frustration and anger.

      In another narrative, racism may be a real problem, but poor people are responsible for their own poverty and for pulling themselves out of it. The police are just doing their job, and unfortunately, sometimes people get hurt. If people didn’t break laws and resist arrest, they wouldn’t be hurt by the cops.

      There are other narratives, too—many of them, too many to go into here.

      The competing narratives are so different that they seem like different versions of reality, which is exactly what they are.

      You can see similar battles for the obvious in media and politics all over the world, in debates about taxes, guns, religion, immigration, health care, and foreign policy.

      We are like the blind men and the elephant, spouting multiple competing and conflicting narratives, which are unfolding everywhere in society, all the time.

      What is wrong with us?

      I once asked a neuroscientist, “What’s the difference between consciousness and dreaming?”

      “Very little,” he told me. “In fact,” he said, “if you look at an MRI, at the actual brain processes that are happening when you are dreaming and when you are awake, they look almost identical. Only a practiced neuroscientist can tell the difference.”

      What’s going on? Are we walking around dreaming?

      It’s closer to that than you would think.

      

      The obvious is not obvious. It is constructed. We work together, as individuals and in groups, to construct the obvious every day. We band together in “obvious clubs” that defend competing versions of reality. When you walk into your obvious club, you will find people reading the same books, watching the same news channels, and talking to the same people, all of which tends to reinforce the same version of reality.

      When you feel that your reality is being threatened, you will often fight to protect it.

      So if beliefs are constructed, how does that work?

      We construct beliefs slowly, layer by layer, over time, using something I call the pyramid of belief. It’s based (loosely) on the Ladder of Inference, a concept developed by the late Harvard researcher Chris Argyris, a pioneer in human and organizational development.

      Let’s just say this baseline stands for reality, which none of us can ever completely understand. This is the ground that the pyramid is built on.

      Starting as a baby, you grow, learn, and go through your life, experiencing reality through your senses and perceptions. Like one of those blind men touching the elephant, your experiences are subsets of reality. They are necessarily limited. Even identical twins will have different experiences over the course of their lives. In addition, your experiences will be limited by the nature and capacity of your perceptive system. You will never be able to track animals with your nose, the way a dog can. What the world smells like to a dog is unimaginable, because we just don’t have the same sensory abilities. The differences between how people experience the world are more subtle, but they are just as real.

      A neuroscientist named Manfred Zimmermann estimates that our capacity for perceiving information is about 11 million bits per second.¹ That’s a lot, but it’s still a tiny fraction of the amount of information that’s potentially available in any situation.

      Your experience of reality is limited by the range of your experience. So let’s draw your experience as the base of the pyramid, a platform, resting on the unknowable.

      You are also limited by what you pay attention to. In any given moment, the more you focus on one aspect of your experience, the less you will notice everything else. A simple way of saying this is that you can only focus on one thing at a time. For example, if three people are talking at once, you can’t possibly follow all aspects of the conversation. There is only so much your mind can grasp at one time.

      So your experiences, which are already a subset of all possible experiences, are further limited by the things that you notice, or pay attention to, within those experiences.

      What do you pay attention to? In any situation,